The Bushdoctor, Amsterdam — Summary

This coffeeshop has surprisingly good coffee, not that anyone ever comes here for it. I’m stoned. Feeling comfortably dense, heavy, gelatinous. My mind, however, is soaring, tallying wrongs committed against me, flipping through the rolodex of life’s disappointments, beating myself up trying to work out issues that I gave up on years ago. Attempting to solve myself. Cannabis does that to me sometimes, especially the sativas. It’s past midnight, and the Russian kid working the smoke bar told me the place closes in ten minutes. I take one last puff. Some guy with bushy hair and a scuzzy beard is staring at me as I’m writing in my journal. He probably thinks I’m writing about him, which I am now, but I wasn’t before he began acting paranoid, or maybe I’m the one acting paranoid. Stoners.

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The speaker is sitting in an Amsterdam coffeeshop late at night, high and writing in a journal. Physically he feels heavy and slow, but his mind races off in the opposite direction, replaying old grievances and disappointments and trying to "solve" himself, even over problems he says he gave up on years ago. He blames the sativa, which suggests this spiral isn't new to him.

Then the poem shifts outward. A man with bushy hair and a scuzzy beard stares at him, and the speaker assumes he's being watched because of his writing. The joke is that he then does write about the man, though only after the man's behavior began. He quickly turns the suspicion back on himself: maybe he's the paranoid one.

The mood is casual, wry, and a little self-mocking. The one-word last line, "Stoners," shrugs off the whole tangle of thought with humor, as if the speaker sees how absurd his mental loop has been.

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